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“I stepped in it just last week.”
“Dude, that was one time. She cleans it up, I’ve seen her. She’s good about it. If you’re dealing with pets, you’re also dealing with their poop.”
Enzo shakes his head, curly hair flying around his face. “Well, one time was enough for me. I can’t work in the kitchen with dog shit on my shoes.”
He has a point. “Okay, okay, I get it. But Enz, you can step in dog shit anywhere in the city. People are slobs, not picking that stuff up. At least the girl cleans up after her lazy customers.”
Weston and Enzo stare at me.
I don’t blame them. Why am I defending someone I don’t even know?
8
OWEN
As lunch serviceends and we gear up for dinner, I have a few moments to think over Weston’s expansion proposal. Am I down with it? I keep going back and forth. We’re already working so hard, I want to make sure we still have some fun. And in the best of circumstances, restaurants are risky businesses.
Enzo jumped on board without a second thought, but I’m not like him. I’m not like either of those guys. Weston has money to fall back on, thanks to his loaded father, and Enzo has a huge family that adores him and has his back.
Me, I have only my mother. She’s been trying to make ends meet since I was eight years old, when my father left for work one day and never returned. I help her out, but she still toils as a teacher’s assistant, taking summer jobs for extra cash. We’ve had a lot of challenges, the two of us, so I don’t have the rosy outlook on life the other guys do. I can’t just assume things will work out, because I know they sometimes don’t. That’s what happens to a kid whose dad is coaching little league one day, and then forgets about him the next. You’re waiting for the other shoe to drop any time something good happens. Like you don’t deserve it.
So, I have my shit story, although it’s not any shittier than anyone else’s. We all have our demons to face down.
But if today’s lunch service showed me anything, it’s that Weston is without a doubt on the right track. We could for sure benefit from expanding our space—we turned away almost as many parties as we sat, the kind of problem every restaurant would kill to have. Think of all the money we might have made if we’d accommodated those people.
“Yo,” Weston says, coming downstairs from his tiny, cramped office. “Today’s lunch crowd looked good.”
I nod. “It was good. Really good. We would do well to make the place bigger, Wes.”
Yeah, Weston’s sold me on the idea, although I’m still on the fence about asking the woman next door for her store space. I know I wouldn’t like it if someone did that to me. It just feels like a dick move.
Weston sinks into the banquette seat next to me. “We’ll make the woman next door an offer. It’ll be interesting to see how she reacts.”
“What do you mean?”
“The one time I talked to her, I saw her out front when I was coming in. I stopped to chat, and she took the opportunity to tell me she could smell the meat we were cooking. I told her I hope she liked it, and she announced she was a vegetarian. And then, I’m pretty sure she sneered at me,” Weston says.
I wave away his concerns. “Whatever, lots of people are vegetarian these days. Besides, we always have at least one veg option on the menu.”
“Yeah. I told her that. Afterwards, I invited her to the quarterly investor party to, you know, make nice. You should have heard her excuse for not coming.”
“Really?”
He grimaces. “She said she’d be expressing some dog’s anal glands that night.”
“What?”
“I know, right? She actually told me that. Hell if I didn’t feel like the biggest chump in the world,” he adds, obviously still stinging from the rejection.
I started to shake, and then I couldn’t hide that I was laughing my ass off. “Dude, that is so classic. Talk about the biggest blow-off in the history of blow-offs.”
I couldn’t stop laughing.
The woman was a baller, first letting Weston know she could smell our ‘meat,’ and then turning down a dinner invite in order to do something to a poor dog’s anal whatever.
Fucking hilarious.
But the bottom line is, at least at this point in time, she does not seem to be one of our biggest fans. In fact,shewould probably like to seeusgo away.
